Gutenberg, Security, Accessibility... WordPress: What to Expect in 2019

Some of the most fundamental changes to WordPress happened in 2018, and the new year will bring the adjustment of those changes to WordPress and its users. The entire page editing experience with WordPress has been completely redefined for 2019, with issues like accessibility, mobile usage, and security being focused on more.

Related Stories:

WordPress is an open source content management system and one of the most popular choices when creating a website or blog. With a new editing experience, the visuals of WordPress may get a major overhaul this year, with emphasis on websites needing video headers, sticky announcement elements instead of popups and push notifications.

New Page Building

Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor that launched in November 2018, is a visual builder that creates pages using building blocks, will become a major part of WordPress. The good news for users is the ability to drag and drop or easily reorganize sections is super user-friendly and time efficient.

Users can build their own pages without the help of a developer. This also represents a shift in codebase, with a heavier reliance on JavaScript, as that’s the language in which Gutenberg was written. This new editor will become a core part of WordPress, so that means everything will be in blocks.

Accessibility

Usually, tools that are designed to work visually, don’t have the best accessibility. Many users even turn off JavaScript on their web browsers because the code can make the pages more difficult to interact with, and therefore less user-friendly.

Another big part of accessibility is mobile usage. WordPress took great strides in enabling more mobile responsive products in 2018, and this trend will continue to grow in 2019 as more and more of everyone’s daily life shifts into the digital world.

Security

In a time when massive security breaches are getting an online user’s personal data, it is extremely important to have a secure website. In 2019, a larger shift will happen to make sure all websites convert from HTTP to HTTPS in WordPress, so users can feel secure while browsing pages.

This plugin automatically sets up a redirection from http to the https version of an URL. The plugin can force your entire domain to be auto redirected to the HTTPS URL or selectively choose a few pages to be redirected.

The WordPress HTTPS SSL Plugin from CreativeMinds is an excellent all-in-one solution for this. The plugin automatically redirects HTTP to HTTPS, so the plugin does all the work, is simple to install and really user-friendly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, 2019 will largely be a year full of reacting to what WordPress gave users in 2018. Overall, user-friendly applications and plugins, based on JavaScript, are becoming the backbone of content, as indicated by the new building blocks visual builder.

Accessibility and visual builders don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, so it will be interesting to see how users and developers adjust to this page building change and what lessons might be learned from it.

More and more plugins are being available on mobile devices and customers are shopping mobile more than one year ago as well. Having a secure website is now more crucial than ever and the tools to do this are now readily available.